BJ 148: 
,E4 



Booklets in \ew k Fancy Bindings. 



BLESSING OF CHEERFULNESS ..THE). By the 

Rev. J. R. Miller, D.D. 
CHILDREN'S WING (THE). By Elizabeth Glover. 
CONFLICTING DUTIES. By E. S. Elliott. 
CULTURE AND REFORM. Bv Anna Robertson Brown. 
DO WE BELIEVE IT ? By E. S. Elliott. . 
EXPECTATION CORNER. By E. S. Elliott. 
FAMILY MANNERS. By author of "Talks about a Fine 

Art," etc. 

GIRLS: FAULTS AND IDEALS. By the Rev. J. R. 
Miller, D.D. 

HAPPY LIFE (THE). By Charles W. Eliot, L.L.D. 
JESSICA'S FIRST PRAYER. By Hesba Stretton. 
KING OF THE GOLDEN RIVER (THE). By John 
Ruskin. 

LADDIE. By the author of " Miss Toosev's Mission." 

LOVE AND 'FRIENDSHIP. By Ralph Waldo Emerson. 

MASTER AND MAN. Bv Count Lvof N. Tolstoi. 

MISS TOOSEY'S MISSION. By the author of "Laddie." 

PATHS OF DUTY (THE): Counsels to Young Men. 
By Dean Farrar. 

REAL 'HAPPENINGS. By Mrs. Man- B. Claflin. 

SECRETS OF HAPPY HOME LIFE. By the Rev. J. 
R. Miller, D.D. 

STILLNESS AND SERVICE. Bv E. S. Elliott. 

SWEETNESS AND LIGHT. By" Matthew Arnold. 

TALKS ABOUT A FINE ART. By Elizabeth Glover. 

TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE. Bv E.'S. Elliott 

TWO PILGRIMS THE«. By Count Lvof N. Tolstoi. 

VICTORY OF OUR FAITH' (THE). 'By Anna Robert- 
son Brown, Ph.D. 

WHAT IS WORTH WHILE. Bv Anna Robertson 
Brown, Ph.D. 

WHAT MEN LIVE BY. Bv Count Lvof X. Tolstoi. 
WHEN THE KING COMES TO HIS OWN. By 

E. S. Elliott. 

WHERE LOVE^ IS, THERE GOD IS ALSO. By 

Count Lvof N. Tolstoi'. 
YOUNG MEN : FAULTS AND IDEALS. By the Rev. 
J. R. Miller, D.D. 



For sale by all booksellers, or sent, postpaid, by the 
publishers, on receipt of 35c. 



Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., NewYork & Boston. 



THE HAPPY LIFE 



CHARLES W. ELIOT, LL.D., 

President of Harvard University 




NEW YORK: 46 East Fourteenth Street 

THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. 

BOSTON: 100 Purchase Street 



Copyright 1896, 
By Thomas Y. Crowell & Co. 



THE HAPPY LIFE. 



By CHARLES W. ELIOT, LL. D. 



My subject is " The Happy Life." I address here 
especially young people who have passed the period of 
childhood, with its unreflecting gayety, fleeting shad- 
ows, gusty griefs, and brief despairs, and have entered, 
under conditions of singular privilege, upon rational 
and responsible living. For you happiness must be 
conscious, considerate, and consistent with habits of 
observing, reading and reflecting. Now reflecting has 
always been a grave business, 

" Where but to think is to be full of sorrow 
And leaden-eyed despairs " ; 

and it must be confessed that our times present some 
new obstacles to a life of thoughtful happiness. Until 
this century the masses of mankind were almost dumb ; 
but now their moans and complaints have become audi- 
ble through telephone, telegraph and rotary press. The 
millions are now saying what the moody poets have 
always said : 



6 



THE HAPPY LIFE. 



" The flower that smiles to-day 

To-morrow dies, 
All that we wish to stay 

Tempts and then flies. 
What is this world's delight ? 
Lightning that mocks the night, 
Brief even as bright.' ' 

The gloomy moralist is still repeating : " I have seen 
all the works that are done under the sun, and behold ! 
all is vanity and vexation of spirit." 

The manual laborers of to-day, who are much better 
off than the same classes of laborers have been in any 
earlier times, are saying just what Shelley said to the 
men of England in 1819 : 

" The seed ye sow another reaps, 
The wealth ye find another keeps, 
The robes ye weave another wears, 
The arms ye forge another bears.'' 

They would adopt without change the words in which 
that eminent moralist, Robinson Crusoe, a century ear- 
lier, described the condition of the laboring classes : 

"The men of labor spent their strength in daily struggling 
for bread to maintain the vital strength they labored with; 
so living in a daily circulation of sorrow, living but to work, 
and working but to live, as if daily bread were the only end of 
wearisome life, and a wearisome life the only occasion of daily 
bread." 

Matthew Arnold calls his love to come to the window 
and listen to the "melancholy, long- withdrawing roar" 
of the sea upon the moonlit beach at Dover; and these 
are his dismal words to her : 

"Ah, love, let us be true 
To one another ! for the world, which seems 
To lie before us like a land of dreams, 
So various, so beautiful, so new, 
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, 



THE MORAL PURPOSE OF THE UNIVERSE. 7 

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain ; 
And we are here as on a darkling plain 
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, 
Where ignorant armies clash by night." 

The poets are by no means the only offenders ; the 
novelists and scientists take their turn. The fiction of 
this century deals much with the lives of the wretched, 
dissolute, and vicious, and with the most unjust and dis- 
astrous conditions of modern society. A fresh difficulty 
in the way of natural happiness is the highly speculative 
opinion, lately put forward by men of science and 
promptly popularized, to the effect that external nature 
offsets every good with an evil, and that the visible uni- 
verse is unmoral, or indifferent as regards right and 
wrong, revealing no high purpose or intelligent trend. 
This is, indeed a melancholy notion ; but that it should 
find acceptance at this day, and really make people 
miserable, only illustrates the curious liability of the 
human intelligence to sudden collapse. The great solid 
conviction, which science, within the past three centuries, 
has enabled thinking men and women to settle down on, 
is that all discovered and systematized knowledge is as 
nothing compared with the undiscovered, and that a 
boundless universe of unimagined facts and forces inter- 
penetrates and encompasses what seems the universe to 
us. In spite of this impregnable conviction people dis- 
tress themselves because, forsooth, they cannot discern 
the moral purpose or complete spiritual intent of this 
dimly seen, fractional universe which is all we know. 
Why should they discern it? 



It is, then, in spite of many old and some new dis- 
couragements that we are all seeking the happy life. 



8 



THE HAPPY LIFE. 



We know that education spreads, knowledge grows, and 
public liberty develops ; but can we be sure that public 
and private happiness increase ? What the means and 
sources of happiness are in this actual world, with our 
present surroundings, and with no reference to joys 
or sorrows in any other world, is a natural, timely and 
wholesome inquiry. We may be sure that one principle 
will hold throughout the whole pursuit of thoughtful 
happiness — the principle that the best way to secure 
future happiness is to be as happy as is rightfully pos- 
sible to-day. To secure any desirable capacity for the 
future, near or remote, cultivate it to-day. What would 
be the use of immortality for a person who cannot use 
well half an hour ? asks Emerson. 

In trying to enumerate the positive satisfactions which 
an average man may reasonably expect to enjoy in this 
world, I, of course, take no account of those too common 
objects of human pursuit, wealth, power, and fame; first, 
because they do not as a rule contribute to happiness ; 
and secondly, because they are unattainable by mankind 
in general. I invite you to consider only those means 
of happiness which the humble and obscure millions may 
possess. The rich and famous are too few to affect ap- 
preciably the sum of human happiness. I begin with 
satisfactions of sense. 

Sensuous pleasures, like eating and drinking, are 
sometimes described as animal, and therefore unworthy. 
It must be confessed, however, that men are, in this 
life, animals all through — whatever else they may be — 
and that they have a right to enjoy without reproach 
those pleasures of animal existence which maintain 
health, strength, and life itself. Familiar ascetic and 



LOWER AND HIGHER PLEASURES. 



9 



pessimistic dogmas to the contrary notwithstanding, 
these pleasures, taken naturally and in moderation, are 
all pure, honorable and wholesome. Moreover, all at- 
tempts to draw a line between bodily satisfactions on 
the one hand, and mental or spiritual satisfactions on 
the other, and to distinguish the first as beastly indul- 
gences, and the second as the only pleasures worthy 
of a rational being, have failed and must fail ; for it is 
manifestly impossible to draw a sharp line of division 
between pleasures, and to say that these are bodily, and 
those intellectual or moral. Are the pleasures of 
sight and hearing bodily or mental? Is delight in 
harmony, or in color, a pleasure of the sense, or of the 
imagination? What sort of a joy is a thing of beauty? 
Is it an animal or a spiritual joy? Is the delight of a 
mother in fondling her smiling baby a physical or a 
moral delight? But though we cannot divide pleasures 
into animal and moral, unworthy and worthy, we can, 
nevertheless, divide them into lower and higher pleas- 
ures ; the lower, those which, like eating and drinking, 
prompt to the maintenance and reproduction of life, 
and which can be impaired or destroyed by prolonga- 
tion or repetition ; the higher, those which, like the 
pleasures of the eye or ear, seem to be ends in them- 
selves; in the lower there can be destructive excess, 
in the higher excess is impossible. Recognizing, then, 
that there are higher pleasures than eating and drinking, 
let us clearly perceive that three meals a day all one's 
life not only give in themselves a constantly renewed 
innocent satisfaction, but provide the necessary founda- 
tion for all other satisfactions. Taking food and drink 
is a great enjoyment for healthy people, and those 



10 



THE HAPPY LIFE. 



who do not enjoy eating seldom have much capacity 
for enjoyment or usefulness of any sort. Under or- 
dinary circumstances it is by no means a purely bodily 
pleasure. We do not eat alone, but in families, or sets 
of friends and comrades ; and the table is the best centre 
of friendships and of the domestic affections. When, 
therefore, a workingman says that he has worked all his 
life to procure a subsistence for himself and his family, 
he states that he has secured some fundamental satis- 
factions — namely, food, productive employment, and 
family life. The satisfaction of eating is so completely 
a matter of appetite that such distinction as there is 
between the luxurious and the hardy in regard to this 
enjoyment is altogether in favor of the hardy. Who 
does not remember some rough and perhaps scanty 
meal in camp, or on the march, or at sea, or in the 
woods, which was infinitely more delicious than the 
most luxurious dinner during indoor or sedentary life? 
But that appetite depends on health. Take good care, 
then, of your teeth and your stomachs, and be ashamed 
not of enjoying your food, but of not enjoying it. 
There was a deal of sound human nature in the unex- 
pected reply of the dying old woman to her minister's 
leading question : " Here at the end of a long life, which 
of the Lord's mercies are you most thankful for ? " Her 
eye brightened as she answered : " My victuals." 

Let us count next pleasures through the eye. Unlike 
the other senses, the eye is always at work except when 
we sleep, and may, consequently, be the vehicle of far 
more enjoyment than any other organ of sense. It has 
given our race its ideas of infinity, symmetry, grace, 
and splendor ; it is a chief source of childhood's joys, 



PLEASURES THROUGH EYE AND EAR. 11 



and throughout life the guide to almost all pleasurable 
activities. The pleasure it gives us, however, depends 
largely upon the amount of attention we pay to the pic- 
tures which it incessantly sets before the brain. Tw^o 
men walk along the same road ; one notices the blue 
depths of the sky, the floating clouds, the opening leaves 
upon the trees, the green grass, the yellow buttercups, 
and the far stretch of the open fields ; the other has pre- 
cisely the same pictures on his retina, but pays no atten- 
tion to them. One sees, and the other does not see; 
one enjoys an unspeakable pleasure, and the other loses 
that pleasure which is as free to him as the air. The 
beauties which the eye reveals are infinitely various in 
quality and scale ; one mind prefers the minute, another 
the vast; one the delicate and tender, another the coarse 
and rough ; one the inanimate things, another the ani- 
mate creation. The whole outward world is the king- 
dom of the observant eye. He who enters into any part 
of that kingdom to possess it has a store of pure enjoy- 
ment in life which is literally inexhaustible and immeas- 
urable. His eyes alone will give him a life worth living. 

Next comes the ear as a minister of enjoyment, but 
next at a great interval. The average man probably 
does not recognize that he gets much pleasure through 
hearing. He thinks that his ears are to him chiefly a 
convenient means of human intercourse. But let him 
experience a temporary deafness, and he will learn that 
many a keen delight came to him through the ear. He 
will miss the beloved voice, the merry laugh, the hum 
of the city, the distant chime, the song of birds, the run- 
ning brook, the breeze in the trees, the lapping wavelets, 
and the thundering beach; and he will learn that famil- 



12 



THE HAPPY LIFE. 



iar sounds have been to him sources of pure delight — 
an important element in his well-being. Old Isaak 
Walton found in the lovely sounds of earth a hint of 
Heaven : 

" How joyed niy heart in the rich melodies 
That overhead and round me did arise ! 
The moving leaves — the water's gentle flow — 
Delicious music hung on every bough. 
Then said I in my heart. If that the Lord 
Such lovely music on the earth accord; 
If to weak, sinful man such sounds are given, 
Oh! what must be the melody of heaven! " 

A high degree of that fine pleasure which music gives 
is not within the reach of all; yet there are few to 
w r hom the pleasure is wholly denied. To take part in 
producing harmony, as in part-singing, gives the singers 
an intense pleasure, which is doubtless partly physical 
and partly mental. I am told that to play good music 
at sight, as one of several performers playing different 
instruments, is as keen a sensuous and intellectual 
enjoyment as the world affords. 

These pleasures through the eye and ear are open in 
civilized society to all who have the will to seek them, 
and the intelligence to cultivate the faculties through 
which they are enjoyed. They are quite as likely to 
bless him who works with hand or brain all day for a 
living, as him who lives inactive on his owm savings or 
on those of other people. The outward world yields 
them spontaneously to every healthy body and alert 
mind; but the active mind is as essential to the winning 
of them as the sound body. 

There is one great field of knowledge, too much 
neglected in our schools and colleges, which offers to 
the student endless pleasures and occupations through 



LOVE OF NATURE. 



13 



the trained and quickened senses of sight, hearing, and 
touch. I mean the wide field called natural history, 
which comprehends geography, meteorology, botany, 
zoology, mineralogy, and geology. Charles Darwin, 
the greatest naturalist of this century, saia that with 
natural history and the domestic affections a man 
might be truly happy. Not long ago I was urging a 
young naturalist of twenty- six to spend the next sum- 
mer in Europe. He thought it was hardly right for him 
to allow himself that indulgence ; and when I urged 
that the journey would be very enjoyable as well as 
profitable, he replied : " Yes ; but you know I can be 
happy anywhere in the months when things are grow- 
ing." He meant that the pleasures of observation were 
enough for him when he could be out-of-doors. That 
young man was poor, delicate in health, and of a retiring 
and diffident disposition ; yet life was full of keenest 
interest to him. 

Our century is distinguished by an ardent return of 
civilized man to that love of nature from which books 
and urban life had temporarily diverted him. The 
poetry and the science of our times alike foster this love, 
and add to the delights which come to lovers of nature 
through the keen senses, the delights of the soaring 
imagination and the far-reaching reason. In many of 
our mental moods the contemplation of Nature brings 
peace and joy. Her patient ways shame hasty little 
man ; her vastnesses calm and elevate his troubled 
mind ; her terrors fill him with awe ; her inexplicable 
and infinite beauties with delight. Her equal care for 
the least things and the greatest corrects his scale of 
values. He cannot but believe that the vast material 



14 



THE HAPPY LIFE. 



frame of things is informed and directed by an infinite 
Intelligence and Will, just as his little animal body is 
informed by his own con scions mind and will. 

It is apparent from what I have said of pleasures 
through the eye and ear and from contact with nature, 
that a good measure of out-of-door life is desirable for 
him who would secure the elements of a happy life. 
The urban tendency of our population militates against 
free access to out-of-door delights. The farmer works 
all day in the fields, and his children wander at will in 
the open air ; the sailor can see at any moment the 
whole hemisphere of the heavens and the broad plain 
of the sea; but the city resident may not see a tree or 
a shrub for weeks together, and can barely discern a 
narrow strip of sky, as he walks at the bottom of the 
deep ditches we call streets. The wise man, whose 
work is in the city and indoors at that, will take every 
possible opportunity to escape into the fresh air and the 
open country. Certain good tendencies in this respect 
have appeared within recent years. Hundreds of 
thousands of people, who must work daily in compact 
cities, now live in open suburbs ; cities provide parks 
and decorated avenues of approach to parks ; out-of- 
door sports and exercises become popular; safe country 
boarding-schools for city children are multiplied, and 
public holidays and half-holidays increase in number. 
These are appreciable compensations for the disadvan- 
tages of city life. The urban population which really 
utilizes these facilities may win a keener enjoyment 
from nature than the rural population, to whom natural 
beauty is at every moment accessible. The cultivation 
of mind and the increased sensibility which city life 



OUT-OFDOOB LIFE— FAMILY LOVE. 



15 



develops, heighten the delight in natural beauty. More- 
over, though man destroys much natural loveliness in 
occupying any territory for purposes of residence or 
business, he also creates much loveliness of grassy fields 
and banks, mirroring waters, perfectly developed trees, 
graceful shrubs and brilliant flowers. In these days no 
intelligent city population need lack the means and 
opportunities of frequent out-of-door enjoyment. Our 
climate is indeed rough and changeable, but, on the 
whole, produces scenes of much more various beauty 
than any monotonous climate, while against the occa- 
sional severity of our weather artificial protection is more 
and more provided. What we may wisely ask of our 
tailors and our landscape architects is protection in the 
open air from the extremes of heat, cold, and wind. 
The provision of an equable climate indoors is by no 
means sufficient to secure either the health or the hap- 
piness of the people. 

From the love of nature we turn to family love. The 
domestic affections are the principal source of human 
happiness and well-being. The mutual loves of husband 
and wife, of parents and children, of brothers and sis- 
ters, are not only the chief sources of happiness, but the 
chief springs of action, and the chief safeguards from 
evil. The young man and the young woman work and 
save, in order that they may be married and have a home 
of their own; once married, they work and save, that 
they may bring up well a family. The supreme object 
of the struggling and striving of most men is the family. 
One might almost say that the security and elevation of 
the family and of family life are the prime objects of civ- 



16 



THE HAPPY LIFE. 



ilization, and the ultimate ends of all industry and trade. 
In respect to this principal source of happiness, the 
young mechanic, operative, clerk, or laborer is generally 
better off than the young professional man, inasmuch 
as he can marry earlier. He goes from the parental 
roof to his own roof with only a short interval, if any, 
between. The workingman is often a grandfather be- 
fore he is fifty years old ; the professional man but sel- 
dom. Love before marriage, being the most attractive 
theme of poetry and fiction, gets a very disproportion- 
ate amount of attention in literature, as compared with 
the domestic affections after marriage. 

Concerning these normal domestic joys, any discern- 
ing person who has experienced them, and has been in- 
timate with four or five generations, will be likely to 
make three observations : In the first place, the realiza- 
tion of the natural and legitimate enjoyments in dom- 
estic life depends on the possession of physical and 
moral health. Whatever impairs bodily vigor, animal 
spirits, and good temper lessens the chance of attaining 
to the natural domestic joys — joys which by them- 
selves, without any additions whatever except food and 
steady work, make earthly life worth living. In the 
second place, they endure, and increase with lapse of 
years ; the satisfactions of normal married life do not 
decline, but mount. Children are more and more in- 
teresting as they grow older ; at all stages, from baby- 
hood to manhood and womanhood, they are to be daily 
enjoyed. People who think they shall enjoy their 
children to-morrow, or year after next, will never enjoy 
them. The greatest pleasure in them comes late ; for as 
Hamerton mentions in his "Human Intercourse," the 



PLEASURE IJSf BODILY EXERTION. 



17 



most exquisite satisfaction of the parent is to come to 
respect and admire the powers and character of the child. 
Thirdly, the family affections and joys are the ultimate 
source of civilized man's idea of a loving God — an idea 
which is a deep root of happiness when it becomes an 
abiding conviction. They have supplied all the concep- 
tions of which this idea is the supreme essence, or in- 
finite product. It deserves mention here that these 
supreme enjoyments of the normal, natural life — the 
domestic joys — are woman's more than man's ; because 
his function of bread- winning necessarily separates him 
from his home during a good part of his time, particu- 
larly since domestic or house industries have been super- 
seded by factory methods. 

I turn now to the satisfaction which comes from phys- 
ical exertion, including brainwork. Everybody knows 
some form of activity which gives him satisfaction. Per- 
haps it is riding a horse, or rowing a boat, or tramping 
all day through woods or along beaches with a gun on 
the shoulder, or climbing a mountain, or massing into a 
ball or bloom a paste of sticky iron in a puddling fur- 
nace (that heaviest of labor), or wrestling with the handles 
of the plunging, staggering plow, or tugging at a boat's 
tiller when the breeze is fresh, or getting in hay before 
the shower. There is real pleasure and exhilaration in 
bodily exertion, particularly with companionship (of 
men or animals) and competition. There is pleasure in 
the exertion even when it is pushed to the point of fa- 
tigue, as many a sportsman knows ; and this pleasure is 
in good measure independent of the attainment of any 
practical end. There is pleasure in mere struggle, so it 



18 



THE HAPPY LIFE. 



be not hopeless, and in overcoming resistance, obstacles, 
and hardships. When to the pleasure of exertion is 
added the satisfaction of producing a new value, and the 
further satisfaction of earning a livelihood through that 
new value, we have the common pleasurable conditions 
of productive labor. Every workingman who is worth his 
salt (I care not whether he works with his hands and brains, 
or with his brains alone), takes satisfaction, first, in the 
working, secondly, in the product of his work, and thirdly, 
in what that product yields to him. The carpenter who 
takes no pleasure in the mantel he has made, the farm 
laborer who does not care for the crops he has cultivated, 
the weaver who takes no pride in the cloth he has woven, 
the engineer who takes no interest in the working of the 
engine he directs, is a monstrosity. It is an objection 
to many forms of intellectual labor that their immediate 
product is intangible and often imperceptible. The fruit 
of mental labor is often diffused, remote, or subtile. It 
eludes measurement, and even observation. On the 
other hand, mental labor is more enjoyable than manual 
labor in the process. The essence of the joy lies in the 
doing, rather than in the result of the doing. There 
is a lifelong and solid satisfaction in any productive 
labor, manual or mental, which is not pushed beyond 
the limit of strength. The difference between the 
various occupations of men in respect to yielding 
this satisfaction is much less than people suppose ; for 
occupations become habitual in time, and the daily 
work in every calling gets to be so familiar that it may 
fairly be called monotonous. My occupation, for in- 
stance, offers, I believe, more variety than that of most 
professional men ; yet I should say that nine-tenths of 



THE PLEASURE OF READIXG. 



19 



my work, from day to day, was routine work, present- 
ing no more novelty or fresh interest to me than the 
work of a carpenter or blacksmith, who is always mak- 
ing new things on old types, presents to him. The 
Oriental, hot-climate figment, that labor is a curse, is 
contradicted by the experience of all the progressive 
nations. The Teutonic stock owes everything that is 
great and inspiring in its destiny to its faculty of over- 
coming difficulties by hard work, and of taking heartfelt 
satisfaction in this victorious work. It is not the dawd- 
lers and triflers who find life worth living ; it is the 
steady, strenuous, robust workers. 

Once when I was talking with Dr. Oliver Wendell 
Holmes about the best pleasures in life, he mentioned, 
as one of the most precious, frequent contact with quick 
and well-stored minds in large variety; he valued high- 
ly the number, frequency, and variety of quickening in- 
tellectual encounters. We were thinking of contact in 
conversation ; but this pleasure, if only to be procured 
by personal meetings, would obviously be within the 
reach, as a rule, of only a very limited number of per- 
sons. Fortunately for us and for posterity, the cheap 
printing press has put within easy reach of every man 
who can read all the best minds both of the past and 
the present For one-tenth part of a year's wages a 
young mechanic can buy, before he marries, a library 
of famous books which, if he masters it, will make him 
a well-read man. For half-a-day's wages a clerk can 
provide himself with a weekly paper which will keep 
him informed for a year of all important current events. 
Public libraries, circulating libraries, Sunday-school 



20 



THE HAPPY LIFE. 



libraries, and book-clubs nowadays bring much reading 
to the door of every household and every solitary crea- 
ture that wants to read. This is a new privilege for the 
mass of mankind ; and it is an inexhaustible source of 
intellectual and spiritual nutriment. It seems as if this 
new privilege alone must alter the whole aspect of soci- 
ety in a few generations. Books are the quietest and 
most constant of friends ; they are the most accessible 
and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teach- 
ers. With his daily work and his books, many a man, 
whom the world thought forlorn, has found life worth 
living. It is a mistake to suppose that a great deal of 
leisure is necessary for this happy intercourse with books. 
Ten minutes a day devoted affectionately to good books 
— indeed to one book of the first order like the English 
Bible or Shakespeare, or to two or three books of the 
second order like Homer, Virgil, Milton or Bacon — will 
in thirty years make all the difference between a culti- 
vated and an uncultivated man, between a man mentally 
rich and a man mentally poor. The pleasures of read- 
ing are, of course, in good part pleasures of the im- 
agination ; but they are just as natural and actual as 
pleasures of the sense, and are often more accessible arid 
more lasting. 

In the next place I ask your attention to the fact that 
man is a part of outward nature, and that the men and 
women among whom our lot is cast are an important 
part of our actual environment. In some relation or 
other to these human beings we perforce must stand. 
The question — in what relation we had better stand to 
them — is a practical, this- world question, and not a 



MUTUAL SEE VICE AND CO-OPERATION, 21 



sentimental or next- world question. Further, our sym- 
pathetic feelings, over which we have hardly more con- 
trol than we have over the beating of our hearts, 
go out to our fellow-men more and more widely, as bet- 
ter means of communication bring home to us the joys 
and sorrows of widespread multitudes. In what rela- 
tion is it for our satisfaction to stand in this world to- 
ward our fellow-men? Shall we love or hate them, 
bless or curse them, help or hinder them ? These are 
not theoretical questions which arise out of religious 
speculation or some abstract philosophy. They are 
earthly, every-day, concrete questions, as intensely prac- 
tical as the question how are we to get our daily bread, 
or where are we to find shelter from the snowstorm. 
Human beings are all about us ; we and they are mutu- 
ally dependent in ways so complex and intricate that 
no wisdom can unravel them. It is in vain for us or 
them to say, Let us alone ; for that is a downright im- 
possibility. To the question, — How do reasonable men 
under these circumstances, naturally and inevitably in- 
cline to act toward their fellow-beings? — there is but 
one common-sense, matter-of-fact answer, namely — 
they incline to serve and co-operate with them. That 
civilized society exists at all is a demonstration that this 
inclination in the main governs human relations. Every 
great city is dependent for food, drink, and fuel on a 
few bridges, dams, canals, or aqueducts which a dozen 
intelligent human devils, armed with suitable explosives 
and fire-bombs, could destroy in a night. If the doc- 
trine of total depravity were anything but the invention 
of a morbid human imagination, the massing of people 
by hundreds of thousands would be too dangerous to be 



22 



THE HAPPY LIFE. 



attempted. Civilized society assumes that the great 
majority of men Trill combine to procure advantages, re- 
sist evils, defend rights, and remedy wrongs. Follow- 
ing this general and inevitable inclination, the individ- 
ual finds that by serving others he best serves himself; 
because he thus conforms to the promptings of his own 
and their best nature. The most satisfactory thin^ in 
all this earthly life is to be able to serve our fellow-be- 
ings — first those who are bound to us by ties of love, 
then the wider circle of fellow-townsmen, fellow-country- 
men or fellow-men. To be of service is a solid foundation 
for contentment in this world. For our present purpose 
it does not matter where we got these ideas about our 
own better nature and its best satisfaction : it is enough 
that our generation, as a matter of fact, has these ideas, 
and is ruled by them. 

The amount of the service is no measure of the satis- 
faction or happiness which he who renders the service 
derives from it. One man founds an academy or a hos- 
pital; another sends one boy to be educated at the acad- 
emy, or one sick man to be treated at the hospital. The 
second is the smaller service, but may yield the greater 
satisfaction. Sir Samuel Romilly attacked the mon- 
strous English laws which affixed the death penalty to a 
large number of petty offences against property, like 
poaching, sheep-stealing and pocket-picking. In the 
dawn of a February morning, when the wind was blow- 
ing a gale and the thermometer was below zero. Captain 
Smith, of the Cuttyhunk Lighthouse, took three men oft 
a wreck which the heavy sea was fast pounding to pieces 
on a reef close below the light. Sir Samuel Pioniilly's 
labors ultimately did an amount of good quite beyond 



THE SPIRIT OF SERVICE— A GOOD NAME. 23 

computation ; but he lived to see accomplished only a 
small part of the beneficent changes he had advocated. 
The chances are that Captain Smith got more satisfac- 
tion for the rest of his life out of that rescue, done in an 
hour, than Sir Samuel out of his years of labor for a 
much-needed reform in the English penal code. There 
was another person who took satisfaction in that rescue 
ever after, and was entitled to. When day dawned on 
that wintry morning, Captain Smith's wife, who had 
been listening restlessly to the roar of the sea and the 
wind, could lie still no longer. She got up and looked out 
of the window. To her horror there was a small schooner 
on the reef in plain sight, one mast fallen over the side, 
and three men lashed to the other mast. Her husband 
was still fast asleep. Must she rouse him? If she did, 
she knew he would go out there into that furious sea and 
freezing wind. If she waited only a little while, the 
men would be dead, and it would be of no use to 
go. Should she speak to him? She did. Oh, it is 
not the amount of good done which measures the love 
or heroism which prompted the serviceable deed, or the 
happiness which the doer gets from it ! It is the spirit 
of service which creates both the merit and the satisfac- 
tion. 

One of the purest and most enduring of human pleas- 
ures is to be found in the possession of a good name 
among one's neighbors and acquaintances. As Shake- 
speare puts it : 

" The purest treasure mortal times afford 
Is spotless reputation." 

This is not fame, or even distinction ; it is local repu- 
tation among the few scores or hundreds of persons 



24 



THE HAPPY LIFE. 



who really know one. It is a satisfaction quite of this 
world, and one attained by large numbers of quiet men 
and women whose names are never mentioned beyond 
the limits of their respective sets of acquaintance. Such 
reputation regards, not mental power or manual skill, 
but character ; it is slowly built upon purity, integrity, 
courage, and sincerity. To possess it is a crowning satis- 
faction which is oftenest experienced to the full rather 
late in life, when some other pleasures begin to fade 
away. 

Lastly, I shall venture to call your attention to the 
importance — with a view to a happy life — of making 
a judicious selection of beliefs. Here we are living on 
a little islet of sense and fact in the midst of a bound- 
less ocean of the unknown and mysterious. From year 
to year and century to century the islet expands, as new 
districts are successively lifted from out the encompass- 
ing sea of ignorance ; but it still remains encircled by 
this prodigious sea. In this state of things every in- 
quisitive, truth-seeking human being is solicited by in- 
numerable beliefs, old and new. The past generations, 
out of which we spring, have been believing many 
undemonstrated and undemonstrabie things ; and we in- 
herit their beliefs. Every year new beliefs appeal to us 
for acceptance, some of them clashing with the old. 
Everybody holds numerous beliefs on subjects outside 
the realm of knowledge ; and, moreover, everybody has 
to act on these beliefs from hour to hour. All men of 
science walk by faith and not by sight in exploring and 
experimenting, the peculiarity of their walk being that 
they generally take but one step at a time, and that a 



THE SELECTION OF BELIEFS. 



25 



short one. All business proceeds on beliefs, or judg- 
ments of probabilities, and not on certainties. The very 
essence of heroism is that it takes adverse chances ; so 
that full foreknowledge of the issue would subtract from 
the heroic quality. Beliefs, then, we must have and 
must act on ; and they are sure to affect profoundly our 
happiness in this world. How to treat our old beliefs 
and choose our new ones, with a view to happiness, is 
in these days a serious problem for every reflective 
person. 

The first steps toward making a calm choice are to 
observe strictly the line of demarcation between facts 
on the one hand and beliefs on the other, and to hold 
facts as facts and beliefs as nothing more than beliefs. 
Next we need a criterion or touchstone for beliefs old 
and new. The surest touchstone is the ethical standard 
which, through inheritance, education, and the experi- 
ence of daily life, has, as a matter of fact, become our 
standard. It is not for our happiness to believe any 
proposition about the nature of man, the universe, or God, 
which is really at war with our fundamental instincts of 
honor and justice, or with our ideals of gentleness and 
love, no matter how those instincts and ideals have been 
implanted or arrived at. The man or woman who hopes 
to attain reflective happiness, as he works his strenuous 
way through the world, must bring all beliefs, old and 
new, to this critical test, and must reject, or refuse to 
entertain, beliefs which do not stand the test. 

One obvious fact of observation seems to contradict 
this correlation of beliefs with ethical content and, 
therefore, with happiness. Millions of comfortable men 
and women do, as a matter of fact, believe various long- 



26 



THE HAPPY LIFE. 



transmitted doctrines which are clearly repulsive to the 
moral sense of the entire present generation. How can 
this be ? Simply because these millions accept also 
antidotal doctrines which neutralize the natural effect of 
the first beliefs. This process may persist for genera- 
tions without affecting much the happiness of mankind, 
but nevertheless it has its dangers ; for if faith in the 
antidotes be lost first, a moral chaos may set in. 

Sudden and solitary changes of belief are seldom 
happy. A gentle, gradual transformation of beliefs, in 
company with kindred, neighbors and friends, is the 
happiest. Men have always been gregarious in beliefs ; 
if they cannot remain with their own herd, it will be for 
their happiness to join a more congenial herd as quickly 
as possible. 

Of the two would-be despots in beliefs — the despot 
who authoritatively commands men to believe as he 
says, and the despot who forbids men to believe at all 
— the first is the more tolerable to the immense majority 
of mankind. Under the first despot millions of people 
have lived and now live in contented faith ; but nobody 
can live happily under the other. To curious, truth- 
seeking, pioneering minds one seems as bad as the other, 
and neither in any way endurable. 

A certain deliberation in accepting new beliefs is 
conducive to happiness, particularly if the new ideas 
are destructive rather than constructive. Emerson rec- 
ommends us, as a measure of intellectual economy, not 
to read a book until it is at least one year old — so many 
books disappear in a year. In like manner, of novel 
speculative opinions, all but the best built and most 



THE CONFLICT WITH EVIL. 



27 



buoyant will go under within ten years of their launch- 
ing. 

We may be sure that cheerful beliefs about the un- 
seen world, framed in full harmony with the beauty of 
the visible universe, and with the sweetness of the 
domestic affections and joys, and held in company with 
kindred and friends, will illuminate the dark places on 
the pathway of earthly life, and brighten all the road. 

Having thus surveyed the various joys and satisfac- 
tions which may make civilized life happy for multitudes 
upon multitudes of our race, I hasten to admit that there 
are physical and moral evils in this world which impair 
or interrupt earthly happiness. The worst of the 
physical evils are lingering diseases and untimely deaths. 
I admit, too, that not a few men do, as a matter of fact, 
lead lives not worth living. I admit, also, that there 
are dreadful, as well as pleasing, sights and sounds in this 
world, and that many seemingly cruel catastrophes and 
destructions mark the course of nature. Biological 
science has lately impressed many people with the preva- 
lence of cruelty and mutual destruction in the animal 
and vegetable world. From man down, the creatures 
live by preying on each other. Insidious parasites in- 
fest all kinds of plants and animals. Every living thing 
seems to have its mortal foe. The very ants go to war, 
for all the world like men, and Venus's flytrap (Diontea) 
is as cruel as a spider. So human society is riddled 
with mischiefs and wrongs, some, like Armenian mas- 
sacres, due to surviving savagery, and some, like slums, to 
sickly civilization. It would seem impossible to wring 
satisfaction and thoughtful happiness from such evils; 



28 



THE HAPPY LIFE. 



yet that is just what men of noble natures are con- 
stantly doing. They fight evil, and from the contest 
win content and even joy. Nobody has any right to 
find life uninteresting or unrewarding, who sees within 
the sphere of his own activity a wrong he can help 
to remedy, or within himself an evil he can hope to 
overcome. It should be observed that the inanimate 
creation does not lend itself, like the animate creation, 
to the theory that for every good in nature there is an 
equivalent evil, and for every beautiful thing an ugly 
offset. There is no offset to the splendor of the heavens 
by night, or to the glories of the sunset, no drawback on 
the beauty of perfect form and various hue in crystal- 
line minerals, and no evil counterbalancing the serenity 
of the mountains or the sublimity of the ocean. 

Again, the existence of evils and mysteries must not 
blind us to the abounding and intelligible good. We 
must remember that the misfortunes hardest to bear are 
those which never come, as Lowell said. We must 
clear our minds, so far as possible, of cruel imaginings 
about the invisible world and its rulers ; and, on the 
other hand, we must never allow imagined consolations, 
or compensatory delights, in some other world to recon- 
cile us to the endurance of resistible evils in this. We 
must never distress ourselves because we cannot fully 
understand the moral principles on which the universe 
is conducted. It would be vastly more reasonable in an 
ant to expect to understand the constitution of the sun. 

We must be sure to give due weight in our minds to 
the good side of every event which has two sides. A 
fierce northeaster drives some vessels out of their course, 
and others upon the ruthless rocks. Property and life 



THE PREPONDERANCE OF GOOD. 



29 



are lost. But that same storm watered the crops upon 
ten thousand farms, or filled the springs which later will 
yield to millions of men and animals their necessary 
drink. A tiger springs upon an antelope, picks out the 
daintiest bits from the carcass, and leaves the rest to the 
jackals. We say, Poor little antelope ! We forget to 
say, Happy tiger ! Fortunate jackals ! who were seek- 
ing their meat from God, and found it. A house which 
stands in open ground must have a sunny side as well 
as a shady. Be sure to live on the sunny side, and even 
then do not expect the world to look bright, if you habit- 
ually wear graybrown glasses. 

We must assiduously cultivate a just sense of the pro- 
portion between right and wrong, good and evil in this 
world. The modern newspaper press is a serious ob- 
stacle to habitual cheerfulness; because it draws constant 
attention to abnormal evils and crimes, and makes no 
account of the normal successes, joys, and well-doings. 
We read in the morning paper that five houses, two 
barns, three shops, and a factory have burned up in the 
night ; and we do not say to ourselves that within the 
same territory five hundred thousand houses, three 
hundred thousand barns, as many shops and a thousand 
factories, have stood in safety. We observe that ten 
persons have been injured on railways within twenty- 
four hours, and we forget that two million have traveled 
in safety. Out of every thousand persons in the city of 
Cambridge twenty die in the course of a year, but the 
other nine hundred and eighty live ; and of the twenty 
who die some have filled out the natural span of life, 
and others are obviously unfit to live. Sometimes our 
individual lives seem to be full of troubles and miseries 



30 



THE HAPPY LIFE. 



— our own or those of others. Then we must fall back 
on this abiding sense of the real proportion between the 
lives sorrowful and the lives glad at any one moment ; 
and of the preponderance of gain over loss, health over 
sickness, joy over sorrow, good over evil, and life over 
death. 



I shall not have succeeded in treating my subject 
clearly if I have not convinced you that earthly happi- 
ness is not dependent on the amount of one's possessions 
or the nature of one's employment. The enjoyments 
and satisfactions I have described are accessible to 
poor and rich, to humble and high alike, if only they cul- 
tivate the physical, mental, and moral faculties through 
which the natural joys are won. Any man may win 
them who by his daily labor can earn a wholesome liv- 
ing for himself and his family. I have not mentioned 
a single pleasure which involves unusual expense, or the 
possession of any uncommon mental gifts. It follows 
that the happiness of the entire community is to be most 
surely promoted, not by increasing its total wealth, or 
even by distributing that wealth more evenly, but by 
improving its physical and moral health. A poorer 
population may easily be happier than a richer, if it be of 
sounder health and morality. 

In conclusion, let me ask you to consider whether the 
rational conduct of life on the this- world principles here 
laid down would differ in any important respect from 
the right conduct of life on the principles of the Chris- 
tian gospels. It does not seem to me that it would. 



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